Just a tiny XSLT tip

Morten Bock — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:56:55 +0100

I just discovered this little tip that is quite handy (and obvious, if you allready know it).

Imagine you have som xml like this:

<message>
Thank god it is friday
<from>Tony</from>
</message>

Now, you would like to write out the actual message, and not who it is from.

If you use a regular value-of like this:

<xsl:value-of select="message" />

Then you will get "Thank god it is fridayTony", and I don't really want Tony's name in there. So I will do this instead:

<xsl:value-of select="message/text()" />

And voila, it only writes out "Thank god it is friday" and ignores the <from> element.

EDIT:

If you wanted to write out only the <from> element, you would do:

<xsl:value-of select="message/from" />